"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Friday, May 26, 2017

The New Gold Rush by TFA in Camden

Most critics of Teach of America focus on the criminally-miseducative practice of using white inexperienced Ivy League missionaries, most of whom remain blind to their own racism, to impose a form of corporate counter-insurgency in the poorest urban areas of America, where children need the most professional and experienced teachers.

The paternalist mission in these communities is to enforce "broken windows" schooling, which uses psychological manipulations to achieve a kind of brutal corporate culture based on TFA's troops patrolling classrooms during their two year commitments to continuously intervene and assess, assess and intervene. Most people don't focus on what happens to TFA corp members after their enlistments are up. Many of these converts of their own propaganda return to grad school or to careers, with the self-satisfaction that comes to those who believe in the indispensability of their own corrective powers to fix the poor through repeated injections of corporate positive psychology. Other TFA veterans, however, move on to fulfill the other big piece of the TFA mission: educational misleadership.

Camden, NJ represents a case study waiting to be studied, and it could lay bare TFA's lucrative, inhumane, and self-serving business model, now masquerading as education.

After another year of facilitating massive layoffs and closing more
public schools, our state-appointed superintendent of the Camden City
School District is sustaining his efforts to destroy public education in
Camden. A former Teach for America staffer with roughly only 18 months’
teaching experience and former Goldman Sachs analyst, Paymon
Rouhanifard was dispatched to Camden as a superintendent though lacking
the requisite education, practical experience and certification
qualifying him for the position. Yet, here in Camden, Rouhanifard has
presided over this school system with absolute authority for four years.
Though the Municipal Redevelopment Act of 2002 mandated the return of
local control of Camden’s school board in 2014, the district, under the
direction of Rouhanifard, employed the services of powerful attorney
William Tambussi to continue to deny residents of their right to vote
for their school board members.

Why does that matter? Many
consequential decisions impacting this school district have been made by
one man who lacks even the qualifications to be a teacher, yet is paid
north of $200,000 per year to fill the most vital position in any school
district! Important and far-reaching personnel decisions have been made
solely by Rouhanifard that, ordinarily, come under board scrutiny and
require board approval. Under Rouhanifard’s administration, there has
been an explosion in the hiring of former Teach for America and The New
Teacher Project corps members to managerial and executive-level
positions with six-figure salaries; questionable hiring of assistant and
deputy superintendents with suspect backgrounds; and the hiring of
politically connected yet less-than-deserving millennials (a relative of
Gov. Chris Christie, relatives and in-laws of television executives, an
in-law to a former Democratic presidential candidate) with exorbitant
salaries most district employees (with more experience in education,
connection to the community and credentials) will never earn.

2 comments:

WAY PAST TIME TO DISCUSS THE PROBLEM WITH "...the criminally-miseducative practice of using white inexperienced Ivy League missionaries, most of whom remain blind to their own racism, to impose a form of corporate counter-insurgency in the poorest urban areas of America...."

I might be useful to add "white, middle-class/wealthy," and "blind to their own racism/elitism..."